


rising, rising

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Armor, Early in Canon, F/M, Wartime Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 07:10:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11481273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: He never sends for her, only waits for her to come to him in her own time.At day's end, Rinea helps Berkut out of his armor.





	rising, rising

**Author's Note:**

> So I had a tiny, tiny thought-seed about Rinea helping Berkut into and out of his armor, and my feelings about it exploded.
> 
> Title from [Crywolf's "Rising, Rising,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuLT_qAqTU0) which, in the context of these two. Ouch.
> 
> Special thanks to Winny, for always enabling me, and for helping me talk through all our Complicated Berinea Feelings because we have them in spades. Enough spades to dig up a whole country. LIES DOWN

He never sends for her, only waits for her to come to him in her own time.

_You need not come out to meet the army every day. I know you don’t care for it._

Instead, all his battles end with this: a flight of stairs, and a closed door. It’s only fitting that he would choose the highest room in the castle he captured, at the top of the tallest tower; so far up he can see all around him from horizon to horizon, safe and isolated.

_When I return, you will know where to find me._

And she always does. Rinea counts the steps falling away under her feet without pausing for breath.

“Lord Berkut!”

He has one foot up on a footstool when she opens the door, undoing his greaves. He glances up at the sound of her voice and straightens, still fully armed from the waist up and wearing a bemused expression, as though it puzzles him that she would still stand on ceremony. 

“Could you, please?”

“Of course.” So invited, Rinea steps past the threshold and crosses the floor, closing the distance between them as she only ever dares to do when all the doors are shut.

Someone of his rank ought to have a squire to help him, or at least a pair of dedicated servants. She doesn’t know, still, what possessed her to ask him to teach her about his armor—how to put it on, how to take it off, the name and make of each piece, the logic of it. How the weight sits on the body, how the wearer fights. Since they left on campaign he has not let anyone disarm him but her.

She’s well aware, of course, that people whisper about her _._ Someone so soft and so tender should have no place riding with an army—no place by his side, war or no war. Nothing less than Berkut’s immediate presence ever truly silences the voices, when he places himself beside her like a fortress and takes her hand in full view of so many watching eyes, but even without him she’s learned. How not to listen. How to be strong, though no one who looks at her would recognize her silences as such.

The secret of it is that Rinea trusts her own mind better. Rinea knows that she has nothing to prove. She is no soldier, but she doesn’t need to be one so long as he lets her care for him—because she can, and because someone must.

“A gold mark for those thoughts of yours, Rinea.”

She startles a little, feels the nape of her neck flush. “Was I looking thoughtful?”

Anyone else would likely laugh at her. Berkut does not laugh—only hums, a pensive susurration in the back of his throat. “I know that frown. Not only do you have something on your mind, but now you wonder whether it would be prudent to speak it aloud, correct?”

Rinea bites her lip, dropping her eyes low. Her fingers fumble on the straps that circle his arms.

“I had hoped not to be so transparent.”

“You are _honest,_ my dear.” His is not a face given to smiling, but there’s a twist to his mouth and a glimmer in his eyes that come close, close enough. And when she doesn’t answer immediately, those eyes follow her to the trestle table three steps away, watching as she sets his arm harnesses down piece by piece. “So?”

Nothing left now but the backplate and breastplate. When she steps forward again Rinea looks up to see the sun coming down outside the window, the last light reaching toward him, soft fingers of gold-touched rose on his head and shoulders.

She can’t help stopping to marvel. Dusk is cast in such gentle colors, here in temperate Zofia. Where they come from, far to the north, the sun sets red.

“Does all this...” Berkut inclines his head toward her when she falters, letting the question trail; she searches his face a moment before picking it back up again, and her work too, hands reaching down to undo the last of the straps.  “Does all this make you happy?”

Berkut cocks an eyebrow, but he doesn’t need to ask her what _all this_ is. They don’t need to remind themselves why they’re here, neck-deep in his uncle’s war, chasing the dream of an empire that flashes and flares wild as a lightning storm in the distance.

If nothing else, she can be thankful that today the armor is clean, that her fingers come away stained with nothing but dust from the road. Some days it is not so clean. Some days she’s peeled it from his body rain-drenched and rusting, caked with mud. Some days there’s been the blood, too, settling in the lines on her palms where she touches him, his blood and the blood of others.

She undoes the last buckle, and the plates loosen around him; Rinea doesn’t miss the sigh that follows, soft and slow when he feels their weight lift. “What a peculiar question.”

“Does it?” she asks again, persistent.

“Mm.”

It’s his turn, this time, to take refuge in the silence. She lets him, busying herself with putting the armor away, setting every last piece in its own place. Berkut will want to scour and oil them all himself later. Berkut would bend the bones of his arms backward to disarm himself all on his own, if he only could. One less reason to be touched, one more duty to trust to no one else.

Even now as she watches him from out of the corner of her eye there’s a caution to his movements, a reluctance in the way he unbuttons his doublet, shrugs out of it one shoulder at a time. He folds it once lengthwise and lays it out on the footstool, skimming the tips of his fingers over the fabric as if he’s loath to part with it, this final defensive layer, the one that sits closest to him beneath the metal.

He holds himself differently, stripped down to his shirtsleeves, standing there in the center of an unfamiliar room. No doubt he hates it, being without all his protections, and she wants so much to say it doesn’t diminish him, nothing could ever diminish him. But the words curl tight as a hand around her throat and she knows she can do more than simply say them. Instead, when he reaches out for her, she comes.

“I am happy to be with you,” he says, at last. “Is that not enough?”

His grip on her does not tighten. The question is quiet, almost a whisper, and yet—Rinea touches his cheek and peers into his eyes, and there’s no mistaking the terror she sees there, naked and shimmering and cold. _Not enough, not enough,_ every echo a plume of smoke ghosting upward, pouring into the room until they have to fight to breathe.

Rinea knows this is the one fight that has no end, a battle that is hers because it is _theirs._ She tells him, “It is everything, my lord,” and holds his gaze through each word and does not waver.

There’s a risk, there always is, that he won’t hear it quite the way she means it, but no matter. She can still be glad that he hears her at all. Here, at least, in this small moment, she can tell herself their wishes are the same—nothing but the chance to be alone together. To rest in one another, satisfied.

This, at least, is something she can be certain of: no one else living or dead has ever had Berkut as she has him. For no one else does he set aside that stubborn pride of his and lay bare the hunger beneath, that ache for something close to tenderness. It puts her heart in knots to think about it; Berkut with his face half in uncertain shadow, bowing low at the close of a dance. Berkut down on one knee at her feet, sliding his mother’s ring onto her finger and pressing her hands to his lips, Berkut who kneels to no one, not even before the gods in worship, not ever—

“Rinea.” He closes his eyes and breathes, warm against her palms like a prayer. “Rinea, Rinea.”

In place of an answer, Rinea holds him near, and listens.

**Author's Note:**

> Incidentally the process of preparing to write this fic involved watching [a thirty-minute arming video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC7e99BGI6w), which I know I didn't _really_ need but found extremely instructive and fascinating regardless. Knyght Errant's channel is full of supercool armor-related stuff (the medieval hunt in relation to warfare! common errors in modern reconstructions of medieval armor! SO MANY VIDEOS ABOUT HELMETS!) that fellow nerds might appreciate, soooo.
> 
> (Lastly, for the record, I myself have no idea what Berkut looks like sans armor. Whenever I try to imagine it my brain just fizzles and shuts down.)


End file.
